Illustrations note: 32 colour photographs and over 80 maps, charts, and line drawings

Sales rank: 16,693

Product description

Published in 1994 to worldwide acclaim, the first edition of Jancis Robinson's seminal volume immediately attained legendary status, winning every major wine book award including the Glenfiddich and Julia Child/IACP awards, as well as writer and woman of the year accolades for its editor on both sides of the Atlantic. Combining meticulously-researched fact with refreshing opinion and wit, The Oxford Companion to Wine presents almost 4,000 entries on every wine-related topic imaginable, from regions and grape varieties to the owners, connoisseurs, growers, and tasters in wine through the ages; from viticulture and oenology to the history of wine, from its origins to the present day. Now exhaustively updated, this third edition incorporates the very latest international research to present almost 400 new entries on topics ranging from globalization and the politics of wine to brands, precision viticulture, and co-fermentation.
Hundreds of entries have undergone major revision, among them yeast, barrel alternatives, climate change, and virtually all wine regions; and useful lists and statistics are appended, including controlled appellations and their permitted grape varieties, and wine production and consumption by country. Illustrated with maps of every important wine region in the world, useful charts and diagrams, and stunning colour photographs, this Companion is unlike any other wine book, offering an understanding of wine in all of its wider contexts - notably historical, cultural, and scientific - and serving as a truly companionable point of reference into which any wine-lover can dip and browse.

Author information

ASSISTANT EDITOR Julia Harding, Master of Wine, studied modern languages at Cambridge before becoming a freelance book editor. She took the Wine and Spirit Education Trust intermediate and advanced certificates and diploma in the late 1990s before going on to work in the Wine Buying department at British wine retailer Waitrose in 2001. Julia qualified as a Master of Wine in 2004, winning the Robert Mondavi award for best theory papers and the Tim Derouet Memorial Prize for excellence in all parts of the exam and dissertation. Now Jancis Robinson's full-time assistant, she was responsible for all entries on oenology and viticulture in this third edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine, and co-ordinated and copy-edited the new and revised text.

Review quote

...the most useful book on wine ever written; it is also one of the most enjoyable. Kathleen Burk, The Week Those readers interested enough in the subject to buy the first edition are pretty much compelled to buy all subsequent ones, for the knowledge encompassed in them changes not only rapidly, but also radically. Paul Levy, Times Literary Supplement No wine-lover's bookshelves should be without Jonathan Ray, Daily Telegraph The essential reference book David Baker, Financial Times Wine anoraks will want Jancis Robinson's revised, encyclopaedic The Oxford Companion to Wine. The Times, Impressive Scholarship The Times Essential reference guide Daily Express